Now that Terry is here, we’ve planned our trip to Arenal and Monteverde - just in time for Ryan’s birthday! Sunday night ate at Fresas in Heredia, and we went and met Roy - a Tico who Terry used to teach with in the States.

 

Roy is hilarious - he helps us all with our Spanish after a few drinks. We met him in El Pueblo in San Jose, after asking for directions from 9 different people! Yes, 9! I’m serious.

 

Terry felt horrible that we arrived so late, but TICO TIME is always about 30 minutes later than you say you’ll be there.

 

Roy tells us if we’re driving to Arenal, we should head from our house up to Volcano Poas, then drive up to Arenal. So, we drive 2 hours from our house to see Volcano Poas - seeing here was NOT believing. All we really saw was a brief glimpse of a crater as clouds passed through. We waiting, but the clouds of the cloud forest WOULD NOT move. So, we settled for a postcard of the beautiful volcano on a beautiful day.

 

The drive was gorgeous, we all kept saying it was like something out of the “shire” from Lord of the Rings. However, 3 hours into the trip, we hit Sarchi. Sarchi is an awesome town known for famous Costa Rican wood-working, so you can get beautiful wood pretty cheap. The bad news - if we had taken the highway instead of this drive through Poas, we would have been here in an hour! Oh well....it really was a beautiful drive. About 2 hours later, we arrived in La Fortuna.  Arenal volcano was hidden by clouds, as it often is, but the Tabacon hot springs waited for us. We stayed at “Luigiz’s Hotel and Restaurant” and got a decent 2 bedroom room with free breakfast, for $75. Not bad. We hit the hot springs to celebrate Ry’s b-day. Not bad!